Please note that this version is released as a beta release. It shows a snapshot of our development so far on the road to 4.5.0, which will be released in January 2011. This release marks the beginning of the "feature freeze" phase. Take a look at the Release Plan for more information about the schedule. Read here what it means for our 4.5 project: Feature Freeze.

This will list the noteable changes and improvements between TYPO3 4.5alpha3 and 4.5beta1. For technical details see ChangeLog included in the typo3_src package. For a list of all changes between the current stable 4.4 and 4.5 beta1, please read:

UTF8 by default was introduced. This means that new installations will be automatic UTF8 (7942). This is the first step and some mechanisms were added to have this setup by default but still be able to upgrade existing installations. Keep in mind that we will be deprecating all other charsets in the release of 4.5, but still support those charsets. 4.7 or maybe even 4.6 will be the first "UTF-8 only" release.

Added Khmer language (Cambodian) (16258). Translations will start to be created with beta2 so they will be ready for the release!

Deprecated the usage of ImageMagick 4 and 5 (14449). This means that with 4.5 (and in the long term support) we will still support that ancient versions, but will drop support for it starting in 4.6 already. This will enable us to fix bugs in the graphical engine faster and more efficiently add new features to it.

Added a new Linkvalidator module (16420). Check all kind of links; internal, external and file links. Looks inside headers, bodytext. Provides a just-in-time and via scheduler. Development of this module done through a team which will work on the issues reported to their forge tracker.

A first step for the new Extension Manager was done by refactoring the classes and functionality from the existing EM (16315)

A improved version of misc/advanced.htaccess provides more accurate and up-to-date information and is a real working sample on how to setup your Apache to serve TYPO3 pages. This setup is now also used in the introduction package (11103)

We can proudly present the new Workspace Module (16247), completely based on ExtJS and powered by Extbase / Fluid, as the first core backend module to use this framework. Development of this module done through a team which will work on the issues reported to their forge tracker.

Disabled the "draft workspace" and migrate it to a real workspace (16225)

We now have a ExtJS pagetree implemented as a sysext. Just install the new extension "pagetree". It provides a drop-in replacement to the standard page tree. It uses a new API for "trees" and makes use of ExtJS and ExtDirect. This is the first development snapshots, the team already has collected open issues and will continue working on making it stable until beta3. Report new issues or follow the development in their forge project page

Implement a Grid View + wizard to enable the backend layout to be adapted to the frontend look and feel (16396). This feature was a development from the T3UXW09 and was finished in a very good team work. Just go to the Web>Page module as usual, and select the function "Grid-View". The feature is described in the issue tracker entry and there is a video demonstrating it in action

Added a Live search with auto-complete / suggest to replace the old "search box" (16432)

The former "Shortcuts" feature (in the toolbar, where one could make shortcuts to different backend modules and pages) was renamed to "Bookmarks" to avoid the confusion with the "Page Shortcuts" (15537). This change was also reflected in UserTS options (16252).

Page module will provide a direct link to the list module when accessing SysFolders (15916)

All the stdWrap additions and optimizations also improved the performance of rendering: The general stdWrap method now processes only existing properties in a very small loop and returns fast if there is nothing to do. New additions of stdWrap also take care not to call the stdWrap function in vain (if no stdWrap property is set for example). FE rendering should boost a lot, while gaining flexibility!